3/04/2009 @ 6:00PM

The Science Behind 'Watchmen'

In Watchmen, based on the comic novel by the same name, the flawed hero, Dr. Manhattan, is accidentally vaporized in an “intrinsic field subtractor.” He puts himself back together–transformed!–into a being governed by quantum mechanics. He can be in more than one place at the same time, and his superpowers are so vast that he becomes a cold war strategic weapon for the U.S.

Not to spoil anything for anyone, but this is not scientifically possible.

What is surprising, though, is that the movie’s creators, director Zack Snyder, screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse, and producers Lawrence Gordon, Lloyd Levin and Deborah Snyder, wanted to explore the science behind the science fiction.

Science was ready to help. A pilot program that has now matured into something called the Science and Entertainment Exchange matched the movie’s creators with the perfect academic: James Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Physics of Superheroes.

“They are trying to create an artificial reality. The more support pillars there are underneath that reality, the firmer it will be,” says Kakalios. “You have to get things right enough that the audience never stops paying attention to the movie.”

Watchmen creators brought Kakalios to Vancouver, British Columbia., where they shot the film. Producer Deborah Snyder says Kakalios helped make the science labs look more authentic and explained some of the possible real science behind Dr. Manhattan’s fate–whether or not the real science would ever make it into the movie. “We wanted to have an understanding about the realities of the lab, even though the audience wasn’t necessarily going to see all of it,” Snyder says. “Watchmen is about real-life personalities; it is grounded in reality, so we wanted to make it authentic.”

The Science and Entertainment Exchange was launched by the National Academy of Sciences last fall. During the eight-year tenure of the Bush administration, scientists have grown increasingly worried about the spread of anti-science sentiments in Washington, D.C., and the nation overall.

President Obama, in his inauguration speech, pledged to return science to its “rightful place.” But that will take work, says Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. He worries about a disconnect between the public at large and the scientific enterprise in the U.S. “People don’t understand how much our life today, including our survival, depends on science,” he says. “But we know we can’t go around lecturing people. We’re hoping entertainment is a better way to reach people.”

There are those in Hollywood who care, too. The husband and wife, director and producer team Jerry and Janet Zucker, vocal advocates for stem cell research, suggested the idea of the exchange to Cicerone. Also, Hollywood can get some great plot ideas, or at least plot twists, from some of the far-out stuff that scientists do.

Other advisers to the exchange are luminaries from the worlds of science and movies including Steven Chu, now secretary of energy, neurologist Oliver Saks and Hollywood’s Dustin Hoffman and Rob Reiner.

Obviously, the fun in science fiction and fantasy is that the laws of science don’t hold anyone back: People become invisible, they travel through time, they catch a bullet in their teeth and spit it out.

But serious scientific misunderstandings are rampant. People continue to believe vaccines cause autism, in the face of consistent and thorough studies that demonstrate they do not. Evolution is not understood to be the single organizing principle of biology–and intelligent design is advanced as a scientific theory even after court battles have shown decisively that it isn’t. The science of climate change has been twisted every which way by politics. Some people even worry that the new particle collider in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider, will create a black hole that will swallow the earth. (See “Trying To Make A Big Bang.”)

“People don’t really understand the science,” says Jennifer Ouellette, the exchange’s director. “The more they know about it the better.”

The exchange has another, even more ambitious goal: to transform the scientists in movies and on TV into cool characters, or at least more nuanced ones than just another pencil-necked geeky sidekick.

The TV show Big Bang Theory revolves around science geeks who are clueless with the ladies. But cool scientists are possible. Case in point: CBS‘
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation series, which has drop-dead gorgeous forensic scientists who crack cases using the scientific method and wearing fetching white lab coats.

Even so, science is nowhere near as cool as it was when entire generations of children aspired to be astronauts.

Ouellette matches writers, directors and producers with scientists who coach them through scientific worm holes. “I’m the Yenta,” she says. The exchange can check basic facts, Ouellette says, but it can be more effective when it gets involved early. She convenes “think tank” meetings, attended by movie creators and scientists to hash out the science of a movie long before shooting starts. Already, the exchange has connected people working on small independent films, blockbusters, an HBO pilot and the TV program Fringe.

After the National Academy referred Watchmen creators to Kakalios, he worked with the production designer, the art designer and a producer on details as specific as exactly what physics labs might have looked like in 1959 when Dr. Manhattan vaporized himself.

One of Kakalios’ observations: In movies with physics professors, creators often write correct equations on the blackboards behind the researchers. But they are equations from every corner of physics–thermodynamics intertwined with quantum mechanics–the scientific equivalent of a car chase that starts in Times Square, turns a corner and winds up in Nebraska.

Dr. Manhattan’s “intrinsic field subtractor,” Kakalios says, could have been a device that had the power (in the world of science fiction, at least) to turn off the very real fundamental forces of nature–the strong force, the weak force and the electromagnetic force–which hold everything together. It would have taken a tremendous amount of energy, Kakalios told the movie makers, and it would have released a tremendous amount of energy.

Ultimately, of course, the creators wanted to be faithful to the original comic. “If, at the end of the day, they were going to tick off a million Watchmen fans or a physics professor from Minnesota,” says Kakalios, “I know what I would choose–and I’m the physics professor.”

Scientists abhor absolutes, but suffice it to say it is extremely improbable that Watchmen will inspire anyone to change their minds about stem cell research or reconsider evolution. But it is not technically impossible, either, that this Science and Entertainment Exchange will inspire legions of Americans to grab a Bunsen burner, a telescope or a seismometer and try to figure out how the universe works.

Cicerone admits success will be very hard to quantify. “We’ll know it when we see it,” he says.